Monday, November 28, 2011

Installing Linux Mint 12 on Lenovo x120e

Ubuntu has really been pissing me off lately with the whole GNOME 3 / Unity desktop hokey pokey so I decided to test the waters with some other options. After trying and rejecting some alternate desktop packages within the Ubuntu ecosystem, I decided to try the newly released, Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint 12.

Installation

Since my computer (Lenovo ThinkPad x120e) doesn't have an optical drive, I downloaded the Linux Mint 12 CD (64-bit) release image and used Ubuntu's "Create a USB startup disk" utility to write it to my flash drive. However, when I tried to boot from it, it kept failing at the bootloader with an error that I can't quite remember (I'll try to reproduce the problem, for search indexing's sake).

I installed the unetbootin package, though, and it created a working drive on the first try. Once I booted into the Mint live system, installation proceeded smoothly and identically to a normal Ubuntu install.

First Impressions

Upon rebooting into my shiny new installation, the restricted driver manager popped up and acknowledged my Broadcom wireless card and Radeon graphics. The wireless drivers never kicked in, though, and the graphics displayed text wrong in the panels and menus (some letters and words were a scrambled, garbled mess).

The lack of wireless *and* a proper graphics driver was a definite deal-breaker for me, so that's where my first experience ended. I hope to give it another shot soon, so I'll update this post if I have any better luck.

UPDATE (12/05/11): I switched over to Linux Mint Debian, which is a rolling-release version based on Debian Testing. Again, installation was successful and fast. Debian doesn't have some of Ubuntu's noob-friendly utilities, such as the 'Additional Drivers' (jockey) utility, so you'll have to manually install the fglrx-driver package and then configure your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to get accelerated graphics. There is an automated tool, aticonfig, that you can use to configure your xorg.conf. The following command will install the fglrx driver and the helper libraries to get accelerated video decoding, then invoke the aticonfig command to automatically configure your xorg to use the new driver (Thanks Erik!):

Thankfully, Mint Debian had none of the aforementioned weird rendering issues with the proprietary driver, and Compiz worked just fine (I installed the fusion-icon package so I could turn it on and off more easily).

UPDATE (12/30/11): Erik notes:

I went back to the open source drivers....They seem to work much better for watching flash movies. For Youtube I use the FVR Flashvideoreplacer addon. The other websites are better with the open source drivers then with fglrx.

So, if you watch a lot of Flash video (youtube, Hulu, etc.), you might be better off sticking with the default, open source drivers, buy YMMV, so be sure to try both.

I have not yet been able to get my Broadcom wireless working, but I'll try to update this post if/when I get it figured out. If you are fortunate enough to have chosen the other wireless chipset, you should be fine out-of-the-box.

19 comments:

hah... I read your blog when I first got the x120e and installed a few distros on it that don't seem to quite gel with this laptop. Or maybe I'm just impatient. Pinguy 11.10 seemed to work the best, but was not without problems. I just put in an ssd and was just about to install Mint 12 on it and googled to see if anyone had done the same. Hopefully we'll have better luck with it.

I wouldn't be trying this distro had I not just recently replaced the standard Scorpio black HDD w/ an SSD. It really is an awesome upgrade.

Just installed mint 12. Dual booting perfectly w/ Win 7 (clean install, no crapware). Everything just works. I'm going to keep the open source graphics driver for now since fglrx wasn't working for me in gnome 3. Maybe Mint is different? But I kinda doubt it. My wireless card doesn't seem to be running into the same trouble yours is. Sounds frustrating, but I'm glad debian is working out better for you. I'll have to check it out some day.

Hi Sid,Man, that's great that it's working for you! My wireless woes are caused by opting for the Broadcom chipset, which had minimal Linux support when I ordered the machine (the default chipset had no support at the time). However, awesome open source drivers for the default chipset were added to the kernel like a month later, which made me feel pretty dumb...

Hi Erik,Hardware acceleration works, but at this time, video acceleration does not appear to work.

In mplayer, using GL video output, 720p videos hover around 75-80% utilization on both cores.

VLC crashes immediately if you try to load any video with 'GPU Acceleration' enabled in the preferences.

Youtube (both Flash and HTML5 permutations) videos at 720p work fine in the small window, but stutter in fullscreen. 1080p stutters either way.

XBMC has recently added native support for XvBA (AMD's acceleration tech), but it requires a higher version of the Catalyst driver than I have installed. You should be able to try it using a manual fglrx installation from AMD's installer, though. If you'd like to give it a shot, you can get the updated XBMC packages from this PPA:https://launchpad.net/~wsnipex/+archive/xbmc-xvba

I went back to the open source drivers....They seem to work much better for watching flash movies. For Youtube I use the FVR Flashvideoreplacer addon. The other websites are better with the open source drivers then with fglrx.

Just try it with LMDE from usb; my flash performance with standard LMDE is better then with fglrx drivers.

I've got exactly the same HW and wanted to use linux(it currently serves a purpose of a HTPC) but media playback is still much inferior to windows' : /. Currently I'm using potplayer and mpchc + lav filters, haali and madflac and this thing plays 1080p in dxva2 native mode w/o any performance issues. Go for it if you wanna use it for playback.